Come to the anti-voter-ID march, and be sure to bring your photo ID

I’d say this is one of those stories where the headline requires no further elaboration, but of course this example of cosmic hypocrisy was deliberately kept out of the mainstream media headlines. As Tom Blumer of NewsBusters notes, the Associated Press waited 13 paragraphs to divulge that participants in the “Moral March” in Raleigh, North Carolina were instructed to bring photo ID to the event, even though North Carolina’s voter ID law is one of the things they were protesting. Even then, the AP didn’t actually report on the march organizers’ hypocrisy; they reported on a Republican reporting it. This is Paragraph 13 of the story:

Rep. David Lewis, R-Harnett, said Saturday the NAACP was being hypocritical for directing marchers on a document to bring photo identification when it opposes a photo ID requirement for voting. Lewis helped shepherd a voter ID law through the legislature.

The rest of the AP post is comically biased toward the protesters in a variety of other ways; follow the link above to see Blumer rip it to shreds. One of the bias techniques he calls out is the tendency for liberal reporters to treat everything liberal groups say as undisputed fact, while conservative organizations merely make claims.

Several other news organizations cited by Blumer, including USA Today, didn’t mention the photo ID requirement for the protest march at all. No conservative organization could hope to benefit from that kind of discretion, or oversight.

The Blazehas a sample of the anti-voter-ID fervor on display at the march:

This left-leaning movement in North Carolina has been going on since 2007, according to theHKonJ People’s Assembly Coalition, culminating each year on the second Saturday in February for a “mass people’s assembly” to protest what it views as unfair public policies and injustices.

Among the five fundamental demands for this year’s march, according to The Charlotte (N.C.) Post: “Protect and expand voting rights for people of color, women, immigrants, the elderly and students to safeguard fair democratic representation.”

Which presumably refers to one of the “immoral and unconstitutional policies supported and passed by Governor Pat McCrory,” as characterized by the US Human Rights Network.

Specifically McCrory passed major election reforms in August 2013, including strict photo voter I.D. as well as changes to early voting, same-day registration and pre-registration, according to theNational Conference of State Legislatures.

What absolute nonsense. Requiring proper identification to vote does not, in any way, restrict the “voting rights” of a single legitimate voter. By that logic, their right to free speech was trampled when the protest organizers required them to show ID, and those organizers should be charged with violating the First Amendment.

On a similar note, no legal immigrant to the United States is going to have trouble producing the identification necessary to exercise the voting rights they have earned. One of the big vote-fraud stories of the 2012 election cycle was how several states were able to purge illegitimate voters from their rolls by simply comparing voter registration with the list of people who begged out of jury duty by stating they were not legal immigrants.

The only reason voter ID laws are “controversial” is that certain groups profit politically from attacking them. Claims that our Information Age society is incapable of properly identifying individuals grow more absurd with each passing day; the anti-voter-ID crowd is making a lot of noise en route to getting laughed off the national stage by the Internet generation. But the Left’s brand of life-consuming identity politics measures its success by its ability to persuade sensible people to take leave of their senses. ”Progressives” invest much energy in telling the people of 2014 to ignore their calendars and believe it’s still 1965 out there.

It’s not just a question of keeping vote fraud alive, although that’s a benefit the Left is well aware of. It’s the rallying effect of portraying common-sense voter identification as a horrible racist conspiracy, harvesting support from people who have absolutely no problems with showing their drivers licenses or state-issued photo identifications when they board an airplane, buy liquor, or conduct countless other everyday transactions requiring such identification. (This demonstrably includes the Raleigh marchers – a sizable group of people, bused in from “up to 30 states” according to friendly media reports, who had few qualms about showing their ID cards to attend the event.)

At this point, the ability of “community organizers” to rally marchers by railing against voter ID far outweighs the benefit of fraudulent votes. They’d hate to lose it as an issue. This barely even qualifies as “hypocrisy,” really; everyone involved knows perfectly well that protecting the vote with simple identification requirements is fair and logical. They only pretend otherwise because they derive political benefit and self-righteous pleasure from doing so, or because they hate their political adversaries so much that they’re willing to believe any and all accusations of villainy.

The rest of us must be resolute in our insistence that a government that throws around billion-dollar benefit programs must follow the same standards for identification required of stores that sell six-dollar bottles of wine… or people who organize anti-voter-ID protests.

And every citizen, from across the American political spectrum, should unite in our understanding that every stolen vote is a legitimate vote suppressed. If we can’t agree on that, we don’t really belong to one united nation at all.